by Manish Bapna and Kirsty Jenkinson, via WRI Insights
Where is the Steve Jobs of sustainability? The business leader with the big, disruptive ideas—and the force of will—to achieve for sustainable production and consumption what Apple’s visionary chief did for global technology and information?
This question springs strongly to mind after attending the Rio+20 conference.
Unlike the original Earth Summit 20 years earlier, business leaders were everywhere at Rio 2012. And with governments failing to make headway at the UN-led forum, there was much talk of businesses taking a greater lead in fixing the world’s environmental and development challenges.
Yet apart from Unilever CEO Paul Polman (who declared, “We have to bring this world back to sanity and put the greater good ahead of self-interest”), few corporate leaders at Rio appeared ready to take up the baton. While literally hundreds of business-led initiatives were announced, most were incremental rather than transformative. And there was limited evidence that CEOs recognize that the planet is on a fundamentally unsustainable course and the window for action is closing.
Sustainable Business Pathways
That said, Rio did see real progress in a few important areas for the private sector. In particular, assuming corporations follow through, it laid foundations for more sustainable business models and scalable partnerships between companies and governments.
Here are three Rio trends that demonstrate an emerging shift in business thinking and provide a platform that smart, forward-looking CEOs should look to build on:
1) Valuing Natural Assets
Meeting in the country that hosts the Amazon, global corporations launched multiple efforts to do something about their huge impact on nature. Taken together, these reflect a welcome shift in business attitudes toward accounting for the natural resources that underpin the global economy.
The Natural Capital Leadership Compact, signed by 15 global companies, urged action to properly value and maintain natural assets like clean air, clean water, forests, and other ecosystems. The Natural Capital Declaration saw similar commitments from a further 39 banks, insurers, and investors. And an additional 24 companies, worth a collective $500 billion, affirmed accounting for natural capital as a business imperative.
2) Corporate Reporting and Transparency
Although the final Rio communiqué watered down a proposed requirement for large companies to report on sustainability, it still provided a push for voluntary global disclosure of private sector impacts. Also significant was the UK deputy prime minister’s announcement at Rio that from April 2013, Britain will require publicly listed companies to fully report their greenhouse gas emissions. The UK move won public support from major companies—including Cisco, PepsiCo, and Aviva Investors—reflecting growing corporate acceptance of the need to be open about the private sector’s environmental footprint. Other countries are expected to follow suit.3) Public-Private Partnership Models
Around the world, interest is growing in bottom-up solutions where companies, government at all levels, and other constituents (such as NGOs and development banks) work to solve specific sustainability problems. While public-private partnerships of this nature are not new, they were a major theme at Rio, where business leaders called for swift and scaled-up collaboration. Promising initiatives were pursued around energy access and water supply in particular.
For example, 45 members of the Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate —including the leaders of GlaxoSmithKline, Levi-Strauss, and Dow Chemical Company—announced commitments to improve water management practices and pursue public-private partnerships to solve the global water crisis. And U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the U.S. Water Partnership, through which federal agencies and companies such as Coca-Cola will dedicate $500 million to address water challenges worldwide.
Moving forward, targeted public finance can be used to leverage private investment in such initiatives. For example, the groundbreaking commitment at Rio by eight multilateral development banks to provide $175 billion towards sustainable transport could trigger innovative public-private cooperation in a sector responsible for about one-quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Government Matters
On their own, of course, approaches like these will be nowhere near sufficient to put the global economy on an inclusive and sustainable path. And while companies like GE, Siemens, Unilever, and others have shown that integrating sustainability can be good for a business’s bottom line, companies beholden to shareholders will only go so far in embracing sustainable practices.
It is therefore critical that as business becomes increasingly active in shaping the sustainable development agenda, governments put in place the policies and incentives needed to take global green markets and investment to the next level.
And, of course, it would help if one or more Steve Jobs-like business leaders emerge as paradigm-changing champions of sustainability.
Manish Bapna is the Executive Vice President of the World Resources Institute and Kirsty Jenkinson Director of the Markets and Enterprise Program at WRI.This piece was originally published at WRI and was reprinted with permission.
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“We the People.”
Thanks Leif. It is so refreshing to see someone who is on top of this pathology. Those who wait for a saviour are going to die hot, hungry and thirsty, ME
Jobs will be remembered for nothing- another Robber Baron like Bill Gates- that transformed the economy- for a short while- but neither did anything to prevent the climate disaster ahead.
AFAIK, the only enterpreneur who has recently been compared to Steve Jobs, and at the same time runs a business with some sort of sustainability creds, is Elon Musk of Tesla/SolarCity.
But his 3rd venture (SpaceX) of course has nothing to do with sustainability. I am willing to forgive him that ;)
One of the people making the best business case for sustainability these days is Hunter Lovins. She chronicles the best corporate strategies and also helps to promulgate them in ‘The Way Out’ (making her the Isaacson of sustainability, if not the Jobs).
Will there ever be a capitalist sustainability savior? I highly doubt it.
Capitalism is a social system that is fundamentally based on the endless growth of production and consumption. Such a system will not produce a leader for a steady state economy. Hoping for such is like a very green frog expecting to not get stung by a capitalist scorpion:
I think that true solutions to the climate crisis will only be found with the power of the state (such as a carbon tax) and at the local level — through community action that rejects the capitalist model.
I also like the people and efforts named above.
Following Lisa Boucher’s comment, mainstream economists would do well to consider a steady state economy more extensively — a quick Google search leads to Herman Daly, CASSE, and others.
I would love to see an entrepreneur create net-energy-positive, resource efficient, healthy, beautiful, affordable homes. Not a trivial undertaking.
I’m very much a Steve Wozniak (Steve Jobs’s partner) type, and that might be the rarer category of person that you want. I can flip the light switch on for a Steve Jobs if he wants to get her/his act together. As a product development person, my current solar markets would be (1) heat and hot water retrofits and (2) no-heat midwinter greenhouses installed all the way up to Alberta. As a company we need to hustle into five other gigantic solar fields.
–Why me?
I’m smart. Also I’ve followed an almost maniacal path for all of my life. Finally, Good things happen to your brain when you meditate. I found the Quakers.
–How do I know that I’m not self-deluded?
I ask lots of other people for their opinions. I try to minimize the chances that I take, but in the end I take a chance.
–How do you know that I’m not a huckster?
I try to maintain a reasonable integrity, as befits Friends. I see instances when other Friends don’t establish their integrity very well, and it saddens me.
–I’m different because I speak techspeak. How can we possibly work together?
I’m looking for people that at least speak the language of business.
–Do I have any experience working with other people in a consensus-process setting?
I’ve been a golf cart shift supervisor since the first Virginia Tech gathering, and I’ve been co-coordinator of golf carts (pretty much taking the lead) for at least 5 years. For 2012 we rented a total of 11 carts, we had nearly 50 volunteer drivers and we had 6 work positions. In the 1990s I was Friends General Conference’s first Healing Center coordinator for 5 years.
–Doesn’t the world need less business people?
I see this concern. The world is broken. Business is broken. We do terrible things to people and to the earth in the name of profits.
As a matter of integrity, it’s up to us to try to fix what is broken. “Business” is the only label that remotely fits what we, as people of integrity, need to do on earth.
I have the same feelings about government. It’s pretty badly broken. It’s up to God (to us!) to take these dead bones and make them live again.
The fundamental problem with capitalism as practiced is that no value is placed on earth’s life support systems. Consequently business is allowed to profit from the pollution of the commons. I cannot profit from polluting my neighbors yard, nor can you unless you buy into the system. Corporations can, and do, as long as they usually spread it thin. Corporations are people now,how come they get to pick and chose the laws they like and ignore the fiduciary law of not trashing the commons. For profit or otherwise… Stopping profits from the pollution of the commons will go a long way toward bringing sanity into the business world.
sustainable implies non-expansion of our economy
unfortunately we have constructed our economy on an expansionist model. we know no other way
To quote Steve Jobs in this context is to reveal the frightening ignorance of the problem we face: Jobs built his empire by consuming energy at an ever faster rate. He might have been a business genius, like Gates, but they could not have created anything without fossil fuels. Each PC or Apple product has embedded within it a quantity of hydrocarbon energy, specifically oil and other minerals mined using oil
Jobs used fossil fuel energy and the capitalist system to make billions. There was no other way. Without oil it cannot be repeated
Unless it is in the arena of distributed Green Energy to the masses. A cash cow in every yard, not a parasite on every back.
er Leif….how will green energy get distributed? and once distributed, how exactly do you visualize it being used?
Even with ‘backyard energy’ the means to do it has to be manufactured.
most people cannot make enough energy in their backyard to support their own needs, let alone be a cash cow
Disruptively efficient and practical is a much better description than sustainability for the type of technological change required by accelerating climate change; and, net zero vehicles and mobility solutions highly integrated with information and communications technologies (ICTs) seem to be likely candidates that will provide the necessary solutions to dramatically advance civilization.
And, Steve Jobs’ propriety business model might be better replaced with one that is much more open-sourced, low-cost, and value-based.
In terms of vision, innovationm drive, ethics and impact it has to be Mike Townsend of Earthshine Solutions and the Sustainable Business Lab.